“Hey so, Jordan, who’s playing the Halftime Show?”
“Jennifer Lopez.”
Oh I don’t want her to see that. So with that we made her a promise to watch some ice skating together on YouTube, and she was rather satisfied. We talked about the beauty of dance and I affirmed my little love with the beautiful gift that she has been given. With her stage set, complete with lighting for ambience of course, we had a lovely time. Jordan and I chatted about it some, but more so to ensure that we were on the same page, because this parenting thing is legit, and holding similar values with your spouse as to how to raise your children in a broken culture is beyond worth striving towards.
Then came the glance on Facebook. It didn’t take long for every other post to be lit up with comments, criticism, and dissertations on what that woman did wear, didn’t wear, how she moved and on what apparatus she contorted. Without having actually watched her performance, and given that I probably read only the first sentence of a small handful of posts, I knew exactly what the fuss was about, which only affirmed my being able to make a fair judgement call on the necessity of removing our 4-year old daughter before halftime even began.
Yet I was baffled. The response, as my feed was littered with a bit of both, came as though our entertainment industry has been built on modest means that press little into the sensuous to increase both onlookers and hashtags. To have expected any differently is to have let a hope for discernment in a bottom dollar industry play to a certain naivety around the culture to which we have very much attributed. You didn’t need to grind a pole on Sunday to heighten our mass confusion around empowering women. All you had to do was watch. Now with such a statement, please don’t understand my stepping out of the room to be a proclamation of self-righteousness. Perhaps my having two young girls has brought me an ever increasing sensitivity as to how we allow this culture to shape their minds, for although they are a part of it, they do not have to be like it. Yet might it be true that we forget how impressionable our children are, yes, but our women equally so in their search for self-worth. We see a provocative woman, and whether you gasp in disdain or praise in the chant of feminine power, you are absorbing a trinket that says a woman’s beauty is in her body. Beautiful as it may be, we do not know how to celebrate her physical allure without a sexual inference. So we fear exposing her or we celebrate parading her, but we do very little to guard her.
In a highly sex-trafficked, porn-saturated, adulterous civilization, we disregard what it might take to guard our minds in the way we take vitamins during flu season. My daughter absolutely adores dance, and at this point in her little life, to remove her before exposing her was to speak into her understanding of the intentional beauty of dance, and her beauty in it, not dependent upon a certain dress or strange smoulder. To remove myself was to remember that the beauty I hold, even the physical, is rooted in a deep sense of inherent worth that actually requires nothing of my physical body or the way in which it is presented. How easy otherwise for me, a seemingly well-adjusted adult, to feel the ping of disillusioned belittlement knowing that I could please a crowd, or even empower a crowd, if only to revel in the revealing of myself a bit more, because surely I cannot ask feminine strength to be displayed in celebrities and not myself.
To those of faith, just saying you’re offended, or that you can’t expect to hold the world to better standards because they do not know God as you do, does not shift culture – if indeed that is your hope. For I suppose we do simply love a good spat off a Facebook post. The drama is tantalizing. So instead we merely relegate to the secular that strength is in seduction, and are content to leave it at that, meanwhile keeping our belief-based standards high, looking down at the rest with our chastity belts securely fastened and swimsuits fashioned of ponchos. When all the world knows Jesus then we can talk about female empowerment in a way that is sensible (*be sure to insert sarcasm*) which, mind you, we have regularly dwindled down to whether or not one is wearing a bikini.
Perhaps the next time we discuss empowering women the conversation might be around more than her physical body, because notice we never have these types of conversations around women gossiping with friends or a wife flirting with a man that is not her own. So long as you look good doing it. It’s about time we changed the conversation… which might just start with changing the channel.
EXPOSITION: What belief system have you perpetuated by intentionally or inadvertently internalizing culture? When you consider empowering women, how much of the conversation rests in her revealing or modestly handling her body? On the contrary, how much of the conversation considers resolute uprightness and boldness of increasing integrity?
RISE: Let’s change the conversation by first changing the channels. (It’s vitamin time.) Remove the influences, mainly sourced by the entertainment industry and certain social mediums, that place excessive emphasis on a woman’s physical beauty, whether that be in seduction or discretion, so as to keep from the persuasion that female empowerment begins with physical confidence. Begin first with mediums that speak to her story, challenge her missteps, and praise her courageous growth of character. Let her physical beauty then be an illumination of that foundation, as opposed to the starting point, as I believe only then will she know how to both present and guard the beautiful allure of her physicality.
DENOUEMENT: She is clothed with strength and dignity; she can laugh at the days to come. (the woman of Proverbs 31 who, by the way, sells exquisite clothing. I just love her.)